Idea: The Key to Successful Marketing in an Age of Endless Possibilities
Marketers live in an age of endless possibilities. Every day, our inboxes, news readers, timelines, tweet-streams and apps are jammed full of messages from marketing experts who are slicing and dicing data, tracking engagements, analyzing intentions and generating customer interactions with countless channels of content.
Here’s the bad news. The more you try to drink from that firehose of marketing brilliance, the further away you get from finding the best ROI for your marketing budget.
Here’s the good news. Stop thinking your job is to comprehend, choose and implement one of these new possibilities. Instead, remember that your job is to understand and respond to the needs of potential buyers and users of your product or service. Your success hinges not on the marketing tools and methods you master, but on how well you help people discover and use your product or service to fulfill their needs.
At Hammock, we believe in using a wide array of research to help us gain insight into the preferences of our clients’ customers. However, we must constantly do what we’re suggesting here: Remember that customers aren’t data. Data helps us understand customers better, but customers are people.
If you want to understand customers, talk with them. Talk as much and as often as you can. Don’t read how to market to them—read what they read. Don’t talk for an hour with experts about the next-amazing marketing tool until you’ve spent days talking with your customers to understand what keeps them up at night.
Stop looking for amazing ways to market to customers. Find ways to make customers amazing.
The key to success in an era of endless marketing possibilities isn’t found in a never-ending quest to understand those possibilities. It’s found in a never-ending quest to understand and meet the unique needs of the people who are your customers.
Photo: Eoghan OLionnain via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0
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